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Her eyes closed. He smelt fantastic and her senses swirled dangerously, sucking her down. Telling herself that it was just the champagne, she stepped backwards and would have fallen over the coiled rope if he hadn’t reached out and steadied her.
Instinctively she put a hand on his shoulder, feeling rock-hard muscle under her fingers. He’s strong, she thought dizzily—really strong.
For a moment she just stood there, her body sending out signals that she was desperate to ignore.
Then, without warning, he released her. ‘Are you wearing a swimming costume under that outfit?’
‘Yes.’ Her mouth was dry, her heart thumping and her mind—her mind was in a mess.
‘Then I suggest that a dip in cold water might do us both good.’ Without waiting for her response, he stripped off his shirt and shorts, poised for a moment on the edge of the boat before executing a perfect dive into the sun-dappled water.
Suddenly dizzy, Lindsay realised that it had actually been quite a while since she’d taken a breath. To be precise, since the moment he’d stripped off his shirt exposing powerful shoulders and bronzed skin.
No wonder women chased him, she thought weakly, watching as he emerged from the depths of the water, the water streaming from his dark hair as he wiped a hand over his face to clear his vision.
‘Come on, Lindsay.’
She looked at him with something close to desperation. Joining him in the water somehow seemed symbolic. If she jumped—if she made that leap—’The boat might drift.’
‘The boat is fine. If you don’t come in, I’ll come and get you.’
Slowly, she wriggled out of her shorts and tee shirt. It was hot, she told herself, and her costume was perfectly decent. It didn’t enter her head to follow him into the water head-first. Instead she walked to the end of the boat and gingerly picked her way down the ladder, holding tightly, pausing slightly as she registered the depth of the water beneath her.
‘Typical Lindsay,’ Alessio drawled, ‘never one to jump if she can hold on to a ladder.’
Ignoring the amusement in his tone, she forced herself to let go of the ladder.
The cool, smooth water closed over her heated body and for a moment she felt small and insignificant, with nothing but ocean beneath and around her.
‘This feels a bit weird.’ Disconcerted, she glanced down and gasped as a shoal of blue fish darted beneath them. ‘Oh, my goodness—’
‘Blue Tang. The diving in this area is spectacular.’
Feeling a bit foolish, she swam a little closer to him. ‘Are there sharks?’
His eyes focused on something over her shoulder and the laughter faded from his face. ‘Ah—it seems that there are,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t move, Lindsay, he’s probably just being nosy—’
With a horrified gasp, she clutched at his shoulders and, too late, saw the wicked gleam in his eyes. ‘Oh—I hate you. I hate you! That was an awful thing to do.’
‘There are no sharks.’ His hand curved around her waist. ‘The reef stops them swimming this close to the land.’
‘It does feel slightly menacing, having all that water beneath you,’ she confessed, not brushing his hand away quite so quickly as she would have done had they been on dry land. ‘It’s beautiful. And—weird,’ she admitted, ‘not being able to touch the bottom.’
‘You haven’t swum off a boat before?’
‘I don’t generally find the opportunity during my working day.’
He gave a slow smile. ‘You need to rethink your working day, tesoro. Life is to be lived, not just survived.’ His hand was still on her back—large, warm, strong.
‘I like my life.’
‘That’s because you don’t know what you’re missing. Stay there, I’ll fetch you a snorkel.’ He swam away from her, hauled himself back onto the boat with athletic ease and returned moments later with two masks in his hand. ‘Try this.’ Ignoring her protests, he adjusted the mask and eased it over her head. ‘Put your head in the water and see if it leaks.’
After a moment of hesitation she decided that it would be safer just to follow his orders for once, and dutifully held her breath and put her face in the water.
An amazingly beautiful and varied underwater world stretched out beneath her and when she finally had to lift her head to breathe, she was smiling. ‘All right. Just this once I’m willing to concede that you’re right about something. I love it.’
He showed her how to breathe through the tube and how to dive down and clear it. Then he swam off and left her to get used to it by herself.
She experimented, becoming more and more adventurous and delighted by the brightly coloured fish she saw darting in shoals beneath her. When she finally stopped swimming and lifted her head, she saw Alessio taking the boat onto the beach.
She swam to the shore, removed her mask and snorkel and walked towards him. The white sand was silky soft under her feet, the sun blazing down on her head and shoulders.
‘I’ve packed us some provisions.’ He hauled some baskets out of the boat and handed her one. ‘This island is very pretty. Worth exploring.’ He dragged the boat farther up the beach, away from the lick of the sea.
Then he pulled out a cool box and a rug and strolled farther up the beach towards the palm trees. ‘Your pale English skin will need the shade.’
Unlike him, she thought ruefully, scanning his golden brown shoulders and bronzed back as he casually threw the rug onto the sand. He had the sort of skin that turned brown in an instant.
He lay on his back on the rug and closed his eyes. ‘An hour,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll spend an hour here and then we’ll sail back to Kingfisher Cay.’
She sat down, leaving a respectable distance between the two of them. ‘How did you find this place?’
‘I was sailing one day and came across it. I bought it.’
‘Retail therapy, Alessio?’
Eyes still closed, he smiled. ‘I had a wild idea that I might build a villa for myself on it one day. I like the fact that it’s relatively inaccessible. The way the land curves means that it isn’t visible from any other island. No photographers with long lenses. I like my privacy.’
‘Is that why you don’t allow cameras on Kingfisher Cay?’
‘Yes. I want the guests to know that they’re truly on holiday.’
‘So are you going to build yourself a house here?’
‘Maybe. At the moment we only use it for privileged guests who want a deserted island experience.’
‘How did you find Kingfisher Cay?’ Suddenly curious, she frowned down at him. ‘I mean, you’re Italian.’
‘Sicilian.’ His tone a shade cooler, he raised himself up on his elbows. ‘I’m Sicilian.’
And he looks Sicilian, she thought desperately, with those strands of blue-black hair flopping over his bronzed forehead. He looked dark and dangerous and—’All right, you’re Sicilian—’ she spoke quickly ‘—but why the Caribbean? You have your own islands in Italy.’
‘No one would sell me Sicily.’ His eyes gleamed with sardonic humour and she found herself laughing too, although a tiny part of her wondered whether perhaps he wasn’t joking.
‘Do you have to own everything?’
‘If you’re asking if I’m a possessive man—’ he gave a slow, expressive shrug of his broad shoulders ‘Sì. If I want something, then, yes, I have to own it.’ His eyes lingered on her face and she shivered, suddenly agonisingly aware that it was just the two of them on a deserted island.
‘Can I ask you something else?’
‘Ask.’
‘Who was it that put you off marriage?’
For a moment he didn’t respond and then he sat up, the muscles in his abdomen tensing as he leaned forward and flipped open the lid of an elegant basket. ‘Are you hungry?’
That was it? He was going to ignore her question? ‘You said I could ask you something—’
‘And you did.’ Reaching into the basket, he removed a number of dishes that wouldn’t have disgraced a top restaurant.
‘But you haven’t answered me.’
‘I didn’t say that I’d answer.’ He broke the bread in half and handed her a piece. ‘I said you could ask.’
Exasperated, she looked at him. ‘Do you ever stop being a lawyer?’
‘Am I being a lawyer?’
‘You guard every word you say.’
His eyes lingered on her face for a moment and then he smiled. ‘In much the same way that you guard everything you do.’
She pulled at the bread with her fingers. ‘You should have been a politician. You only ever reveal what you want to reveal. Doesn’t matter what the question is, because the only answer you’re going to get from Alessio Capelli is the one he wants to give.’
‘Spilling my guts has never been my style.’
‘And yet you have a really high profile in the press.’
‘Their choice, not mine.’ He was totally indifferent. ‘I give them nothing.’
‘Why don’t you live in Sicily? Or aren’t you prepared to discuss that either?’
‘Sicily isn’t a good base for an international business. I divide my time between my office in New York and my office in Rome.’
Lindsay finished eating and wiped her fingers. ‘Do you ever go back to Sicily? Do you have family there?’
There was an imperceptible change in him. ‘Just my brother. And he’s with me in Rome.’
‘Are your parents alive?’
He moved so swiftly that she didn’t stand a chance. One moment she was sitting on the sand, congratulating herself that they were actually managing to sustain a conversation about something other than sex or divorce—a faltering, fragile conversation maybe, but a conversation nevertheless—and the next, she was on her back in the sand and his hard, powerful body was pressing down on hers.
‘I don’t give interviews, tesoro.’ For a few suspended seconds his mouth hovered tantalisingly close, almost but not quite touching her. And the promise of that touch made her lips tingle and her body ache, and the stab of delicious anticipation was so agonising that she could hardly breathe as she waited for him to kiss her. Her senses were primed, her pulse rate frantic, her nerve endings exploding like fireworks on bonfire night. And just when she’d decided that he wasn’t going to do it—that it wasn’t going to happen—he did.
And it was nothing like she’d imagined it to be.
Alessio Capelli was pure alpha male—arrogant, confident, imposing his will on those around him.
Whenever she’d thought about kissing him, she’d imagined his hand in her hair, his mouth rough and demanding as he took what he wanted. So the slow, seductive pressure of his mouth on hers came as a shock. He was a skilled, expert kisser—a man who knew exactly how to draw the maximum response from a woman. The heat rushed through her body, lighting every nerve ending like a match held against paper. And she melted in the heat of that kiss, her body growing warm and heavy as sizzling excitement concentrated itself low in her pelvis.
With slow, deliberate precision, he coaxed her lips apart and she felt the intimate stroke of his tongue stealing both her breath and her willpower. And she didn’t ever want him to stop because it was the most delicious, perfect kiss she could have imagined and if the world had ended right then she wouldn’t have cared.
It was as if he’d drugged her, his touch sending every rational thought from her spinning brain.
His body shifted above her and she felt his warm, strong hand slide across her shoulder. She was held immobile by sensual bondage; it was only when his lips moved from her mouth to her breast that she realised he’d somehow removed the strap of her swimsuit.
Control slid away from her and she moaned and lifted herself against the warmth of his mouth, desperate for his touch. Her frantic response obviously met with his approval because he gave a soft, appreciative laugh.
‘Adoro il tuo corpo.’ His voice husky, he concentrated his attention on one dusky pink nipple. ‘I love your body.’ As if to prove just how much he loved her body, his hand slid slowly down her thigh, the touch of his fingers creating havoc with her senses.
It was exciting, terrifying and utterly, utterly addictive.
Desperately she tried to regain some control over what was happening, but every time she tried to gasp out a protest he’d touch her in a particular way and she’d be sucked back down into a whirlpool of wicked, delicious pleasure from which there was no escape.
It was the heavy thrust of his erection against her thigh that finally shocked her out of her state of dizzy stupor.
‘No—Alessio, no—’ With a groan of denial, she put her hand on his chest, resisting the impulse to stroke rather than stop. But she had to stop. ‘I can’t—not like this—’
He was above her, his weight pressing her into the soft sand, powerfully male and unashamedly aroused. ‘What’s wrong with this? I am too heavy for you?’ Suddenly he sounded impossibly Italian, his normally confident English slightly less fluent than usual. Slowly, he trailed a gentle, exploratory finger over her mouth. ‘You are feeling shy?’
There was no way she could put into words what she was feeling because she’d never felt it before. She was used to being in control. Normally she thought of herself as assertive and self-reliant, but where were those qualities now? She was lying passive, dominated by a sexually confident male, and that was bad enough, but the thing that really shamed her was that she was enjoying it. A small secret part of her was thrilled by his strength and virility.
Alessio Capelli had never heard the phrase ‘politically correct’, she thought dizzily, closing her eyes to break the sizzling connection between them. ‘We haven’t—this is just impulse and it’s all wrong. Sex should be a conscious decision, not an impulse. It should be planned.’ Oh, Lindsay, Lindsay, you really shouldn’t be doing this. If you eat too much chocolate you put on weight, and if you sleep with men like Alessio Capelli—
‘So far, this is going exactly the way I planned, tesoro,’ he murmured, amusement in his voice as he lowered his dark head and delivered a lingering kiss to her neck. ‘Tell me something, Lindsay—’ his voice was a soft, dangerous purr ‘—if there was no tomorrow, would you do this?’
He dangled temptation in front of her without hesitation or conscience and she gave a low moan, rejecting the answer that came into her head.
‘There is a tomorrow.’
‘But sometimes it is good to live your life as though there isn’t,’ he murmured, his fingers gently tracing her cheek. ‘That is good, no?’
For a moment Lindsay lay there dazed and then gradually his words sank into her brain. ‘Wait a minute.’ Her voice was husky and she cleared her throat. ‘Did you just say that you planned this?’
‘We’re alone and half-naked on a desert island, tesoro.’ His mouth discovered a sensitive spot just under her jawbone and Lindsay’s insides clenched.
‘And that makes sex inevitable?’
‘I hate to let an opportunity go to waste,’ he breathed softly and she closed her eyes tightly because the shift from meltdown to misery had happened in the space of a heartbeat.
Dear God, she was a fool.
‘I’m a person, Alessio, not an opportunity.’ Her voice breaking slightly, she pushed at his chest and he shifted away from her, his dark eyes narrowed in question.
‘You appeared to be enjoying yourself.’
‘I enjoy chocolate—but I know when to say no. Don’t you have any morals?’
